Shadow Knight's Mate (25 page)

Jack ducked into a kiosk men's room. Another odd experience, using the bathroom practically in public, with one's calves and feet exposed to view. Jack used this one only to change. When he emerged, wearing his swim suit, flipflops, and Hard Rock Cafe t-shirt, he looked as much like a native as the natives did. He strolled down toward the beach, not hurrying: that would have marked him as an American.

Nice boasted one of the most beautiful beaches in the world. It drew visitors from all over Europe and farther. Jack found a few square feet of unclaimed sand and sat down on his beach towel. It was October, cool, and the beach wasn't nearly as crowded as it would have been two months ago. There were still plenty of people, though. Women in bikinis, or topless. Some whose friends should never have let them appear in public that way, a few who should by law never be allowed to wear clothes. Jack watched openly. No one looked back. He felt invisible, which was a relief.

The sun began to go down and people began to leave. There was a tourist pier, a sort of large boardwalk that kept going into the sea. Before the light disappeared Jack walked out on that pier, to a place where it widened. There were for-pay telescopes at every corner, and luckily Jack had the right coins. He dropped them in and the view clicked open. But Jack didn't look out at the ocean. He turned the telescope inland, scanning from left to right, looking along the sand, then higher up the beach. He didn't want to ask anyone where Paul Desquat lived, he didn't want to be remembered as the man who'd asked questions, and he wasn't sure
he could find the man in a phone directory. But he remembered from Madeline that the architect's villa was beside the sea. He needed to get lucky now.

The telescope found a dozen seaside houses within sight, and Jack gazed at each for a few seconds. Too big. Too small. Too ancient. Beautiful places, no doubt inhabited by beautiful people, but not the right one.

Suddenly the view of sand and houses disappeared, replaced by a pair of giant breasts. Lovely breasts even out of focus Stevie, without tan lines, but appearing threatening as they filled the view. Jack jumped back. A woman stood in front of the telescope, topless. This was one of the ones who should go through life naked. She was lithe and smooth and tan. “What are you doing?” she asked in French.

Her mouth was small, it seemed to close up when she wasn't speaking, but that was the only flaw in her face. A good chin, interesting nose, hazel eyes staring at him as if in outrage. The woman was neither young nor old, but walking confidently through her own exquisite twilight of age.

She continued, “The viewers are for looking at the sea.”

Jack managed to answer in French, “I am not interested in fish.”

“What are you interested in?” She sounded accusatory.

Jack resolutely kept from glancing downward as he answered. “Architecture.”

The woman's mouth quirked into a smile. He had been wrong: her mouth was just the right size.

“I believe you'll find the most interesting homes down that way.” She pointed eastward.

She started walking out the pier, then turned back and said, “Interesting architecturally, I mean. One of them won a competition, I believe.”

She turned and kept walking, never looking back again, but her walk convinced Jack that she expected Jack to be watching her, and knew he would be. At the end of the pier she barely paused as she stepped up onto the wooden railing and dived off. Jack gasped.
Oh, Mademoiselle,
he wanted to say,
please don't risk that body by diving into unknown waters.

But she probably knew this water well. She surfaced twenty yards out and began swimming with strong strokes. Eastward, the way she had told him to go. Jack wanted to turn the viewer on her, but heard a click which meant his time had run out.

One of them won a competition,
she'd said. Maybe that was the architect's villa. Jack felt he had some luck coming.

He did get lucky, and it turned out to be the worst luck he'd ever had.

Night had fallen by the time Jack reached the architecturally interesting part of the seashore. There were still a few people walking the beach, but he sensed them as movements and soft sounds. A man who stood still could go unnoticed. There was no moon.

But the villa he sought gave off its own light. Jack was sure when he saw it that he had the right one. Madeline's rendering of it on her sheet hadn't done the place justice, but it was still recognizable. The villa was made of sandstone, so it seemed to rise straight out of the beach like a sandcastle. It was low and wide, except for a crest in the center that rose up two extra stories, a small crown atop the villa. There would be a deck up there, of course, with a splendid view of the ocean. It almost looked like the mast of a cruise ship, except it curved toward the sea. A melting smokestack.

The house stood atop a rise a hundred yards back from the beach. Jack walked up that rise, avoiding the house's boardwalk. When he reached the top, the villa looked larger than it had from the beach. It dominated the view. How could a Circle member live here, in the most conspicuous house in town?
We're supposed to be unobtrusive,
he thought, and wondered if the Chair had ever seen this house. As far as Jack was concerned, the house immediately branded its owner a traitor to his group's values.

He walked around the house for half an hour, keeping his distance. There didn't seem to be any security guards, but there
was an alarm system that included cameras. They might not be monitored full-time, though, they might just be making tapes that could be viewed later, after a burglary, for example. One of the cameras moved in a short semi-circle. One thing it kept in view on its circuit was some steps carved into the side of the house. Jack followed those steps upward with his eyes. He could reach that high deck without going into the house.

First he had to disable the camera, though. He crept up behind it, wondering if it had a microphone as well, and as the camera reached the farthest point of its arc to the left, Jack turned it on its pivot so it was pointing out toward the beach. Careful to stay out of its view, he made sure it was anchored there and then crept toward the house.

He hadn't seen any people through the house's large ground floor windows. But there was a car parked in the driveway in front of the house, on the side opposite the sea. A low, sleek, European sports car that called attention to itself as much as the house did. Someone must be here, but Jack didn't know where.

He climbed the sandstone steps, walked across the flat roof, and found more steps leading up to that high deck. He crept up those even more cautiously. When his head came level with the deck he peeked over quickly, then ducked down again, reviewing the mental picture he had just taken. The deck was furnished in beach-fashion, but with better taste than most people display in beach houses. Two chaise lounges with thick cushions faced the sea. A small black table between them held two cocktail glasses, with a martini shaker between them. Light curtains billowed inward from an open doorway.

He hadn't seen any people on the balcony, but they hadn't been gone long. And that open doorway told Jack where he had to go next.

Wincing, wishing he had taken some secret agent training, he stole back upward again, this time out on the deck, crouching on its surface like Gollum. He slinked across to that open doorway, and began to hear sounds. A groan and sharp intakes of breath. It sounded as if someone was being tortured. Jack reached the
doorway and stared in.

A man and woman were making love. The man was on his back with his arms spread wide, the woman atop him. She had black hair and not as lovely a body as the one he had glimpsed on the pier. That was all Jack had time to notice as he ducked back away again. He sat back against the wall of the house, feeling guilty, like a voyeur with a conscience, waiting.

The breeze from the sea and the small sounds from within the house were oddly soothing. Jack had had a long, long day, beginning well before dawn. Sitting against the wall of the house, he fell into a trance that was very close to sleep. The sound of a door slamming woke him.

By the time he was alert the sound existed only in Jack's memory. He didn't know where it had come from. But a moment later he heard a voice calling from below, inside the house. “Hello? Where are you?”

Then Jack became aware of sounds much closer as well. The people in the bedroom were moving fast. Jack looked at the glasses and martini shaker on the table. Would they come out here? But he sat paralyzed, still groggy from weariness.

Luckily, no one came out onto the deck. A man's voice called, “Coming!” That started a woman giggling, and the man shushed her.

Jack crept over to the open doorway and glanced into the bedroom, his head down near the ground. He saw the man and woman who'd been making love earlier hastily dressing. By the light from a bedside lamp he could see their faces. The woman wore a smirk as she zipped herself up, and the man smiled guiltily. “We were silly,” the man said in French. The woman answered, “Let's ask Alexis's opinion.” The man made a silencing gesture at her as he hurried out the bedroom door into the interior of the house. The woman took her time, moving leisurely, and at the doorway turned to look back at the bed. Jack pulled back out of sight.

But he wouldn't learn anything up here. He gave the woman a few more seconds to get out, then he too crept through the
bedroom. He looked around for any identifying features, such as photographs or maybe an architectural award, but saw nothing like that. He walked softly through the room and out its only other door.

Just outside the door was a staircase landing. This bedroom was the only room on the top floor of the house. Jack crept down the stairs, crouching low. The stairs wound down, and before he was halfway down he heard voices. “We were watching the sunset,” the man said in French. The woman's voice answered in English, “Which set an hour ago.”

There was a pause, and the man said, “You know Yvette.”

In the silence that followed, Jack could picture the women's expressions: Yvette still smirking, the other woman looking at her coldly, neither offering a greeting. Probably Paul Desquat standing there with the fatuous grin men wear when alone with two women with whom he's been intimate. “Would you like a drink?” his voice asked.

“This is important. Jack Driscoll is on his way here. You need to be prepared.”

This brought a flurry of voices. The man obviously knew who Jack was. After a moment Alexis's cool voice cut through the babble. “One of our people spotted him on the beach and I sent him this way. Well, we want him here, don't we?”

So Alexis was the woman who had stepped into the view of his viewfinder. Jack wondered how she was dressed now, but he didn't dare go farther down the stairs. They seemed to end right in the room where the people were talking.

“Good,” Paul Desquat said, sounding more sure of himself now. “Then we will have him and he won't be able to interfere with our plans.”

“He couldn't have anyway,” Yvette said. “Everything is set, and your Jack has just been wandering around cluelessly.”

A pause meant, Jack hoped, that the other two exchanged a glance saying Yvette didn't know what she was talking about. But her assessment wasn't far wrong.

Even without seeing them, Jack could sense the tension in
the room. The pause continued. In the silence he heard the small click and hiss of a cigarette lighter, then smelled the cigarette. Paul Desquat relaxed into a chair and tried to start a conversation.

“What intrigues me about the whole business is that no one except we few know how one day will be different from the previous, but it will affect everything. Even the language. After this everyone will say the word ‘Salzburg' the way they say ‘Nine-eleven' now. It could easily have been another place, but now people will think of the world in terms of before and after Salzburg.”

“You talk too much,” Alexis said, and from the sound of her voice she was moving. Jack had to make an instant decision, and did. Quickly but as quietly as possible, he began backing up the steps. A little more, another two, three feet, and he'd be out of sight of the bottom. He moved on feet and hands, like a child eluding bedtime. Just as he backed up near the top he heard Alexis arrive at the bottom of the stairs. Had she seen his feet? He couldn't tell. Jack stopped moving, because she had. He stopped breathing, too.

Alexis's intense gaze up into the semi-darkness at the top of the stairs almost had a sound, a crackle like a laser beam. Then her foot touched the bottom step. The stairs were metal; that one step vibrated all the way up to where Jack crouched. If he moved she would feel him move, too.

Then another voice cut across. “What are you looking for up there?” It was Yvette. Her voice was playful and mean. “I may have left my jacket up on the deck.”

Jack didn't wait to hear Alexis's reply. He scuttled the rest of the way up the spiral staircase, gained his feet and hurried through the bedroom. He hated to miss what was being said in that living room, but it was even more urgent that they not know he had heard the one vital word.

The glass sliding door to the deck was still open. Jack went through it quickly, and across the deck to the steps cut into the wall, leading down. When he reached the bottom of those steps he was walking across the roof of the first floor of the house. He tried to step very lightly. He came to the edge of the roof and went down the other set of steps.

On tiptoe he ran through the blind spot he had created in Desquat's video surveillance of the house. Carefully he moved the camera back to cover the house, hoping no one would review the tapes and notice the discrepancy. Then he stood in the darkness, listening for sounds. He heard nothing, which was ominous. Some presence was quieting the insects and birds. Jack stood completely still, trying to listen and to think at the same time. Which way? Back down toward the beach? He was dressed for that, but that way was more difficult, down that sandy cliff. He could circle the house toward the front, which would probably be more unexpected. Yvette seemed like a careless person. Maybe she had left the keys in her car.